Featured in IIT Madras’s Shaastra
A user blows into it and observes the resulting colour change in the material inside. This is matched to a colour sheet to detect the probability of three common cancers — breast, lung and oral. The device showed over 90% specificity and sensitivity in an initial study at a leading cancer hospital in Dehradun. The inventors envisage a cost of `100-200 per test though it is not yet final
“This should ideally be an over-the-counter test,” says Siddharth Sharma, PhD scholar, Centre of Nanotechnology, IITR, and a co-inventor